Shira Malkin

Shira Malkin is Associate Professor of French at Rhodes College, where she has taught since 1990. She grew up in Paris, France, the daughter of a Russian father and an Italian mother who settled there when she was a child. Because of the unique experience of having been raised bilingually in French and Italian, she is deeply committed to facilitating cross-cultural communication whenever possible, especially through the medium of theatre.

An actor and a director since the mid-1970s, Shira has been inspired by the groundbreaking work of Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Dario Fo, and Augusto Boal. She has taught and staged French theatre in several US colleges, and American theatre in her alma mater at the Université de Paris. In Memphis, she was cast in Ken Zimmerman's production of Godspell at Circuit Playhouse and co-directed
the Workshop Theatre with Bill Baker. She performed Elisabeth in Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, Mina in Dracula, and Mrs. Mozart in Chamber Music. Her favorite roles include Polly Garter in Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood (which was originally a radio play) and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, both under the direction of Gloria Baxter at the University of Memphis.

One of Shira's main areas of expertise involves 19th and 20th French fiction and drama. She is particularly excited to collaborate with Karen Strachan, a former student of hers at Rhodes, on Chatterbox's first-ever bilingual production of a classic of French realism, Maupassant's The Necklace. She looks forward to many more such collaborative projects with Karen and the Chatterbox team.